"And I beheld, and heard the voice of one eagle flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice: Woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth....[Apocalypse (Revelation) 8:13]

Monday, October 23, 2017

Monarch Profile: King Manuel II of Portugal

Monarch Profile: King Manuel II of Portugal

The last reigning Portuguese monarch to date, Manuel II, had a very
interesting life, with all of the misfortune that statement implies.
Coming to the throne of Portugal before his time, he was young,
handsome, widely popular and seemed to embody a real sense of hope that
the Kingdom of Portugal could be on the verge of a great revival in
prestige and prosperity.

Yet, after all too short a reign, he became the
first major monarch to lose his throne in the Twentieth Century.
Predictably, his country suffered as a result and there was every reason
to believe that he could have been restored in his own lifetime. Yet,
he was not and would live out his remaining years in exile, leaving
behind a very problematic succession dispute. His life, in a way,
embodies the problem with what we know as “constitutional monarchy”
which looks quite reasonable and has worked very well for certain
periods of time yet which always seems to go in the same direction. King
Manuel II was probably the most “modern” monarch that Portugal had ever
had, yet his position meant that he had great responsibility with very
little power and fell victim to a powerful republican faction even
though most Portuguese thought well of him.

His Royal Highness Infante Manuel Maria Filipe Carlos Amelio Luis Miguel
Rafael Gabriel Gonzaga Francisco de Assis Eugenio de Orleans Savoy and
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha Braganza of Portugal was born on November 15, 1889 at
Belem Palace in Lisbon, the second son and third child of King Carlos I
of Portugal and Queen Amelie of Orleans, daughter of the Count of Paris.
As the younger son he was not expected to succeed to the throne and so
was not educated with national leadership in mind though he was still
given a first-rate education. Indeed, young Manuel proved to be a
brilliant boy, becoming literate and fluent at French at only six years
old. He was very much the bookish type, inclined to study with a great
interest in literature and the arts, particularly music, having a great
appreciation for the classics and becoming quite an adept pianist.
Athletic activities were required of course but he preferred to spend
his time reading and listening to Beethoven and Wagner, a young man of
refined tastes. He seemed tailor-made to serve as in intellectual
advisor to his handsome, more athletic and outgoing older brother Luis
Felipe, when he eventually became king.

While his brother was trained for the army, Prince Manuel was set to
enter the Portuguese Naval Academy for his own military career. However,
all of those plans came to ruin on the tragic day of February 1, 1908
when a republican terrorist gang assassinated the King, the heir to the
throne and wounded Prince Manuel in the arm. He likely would have been
killed as well had it not been for the heroic actions of his mother
Queen Amelie, instead, he became King Manuel II of Portugal and the
Algarves under the most traumatic of circumstances. Although he
confessed to being unprepared for such a position and forced to rely on
his loyal ministers for advice, the new, young monarch did take some
immediate and decisive action, dismissing the prime minister and his
government which had presided over such a disaster and replacing it with
a new government led by the distinguished Admiral Francisco Joaquin
Ferreira do Amaral. It was hoped that this new government would
encourage national unity and, in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy,
it seemed to work. However, the republican conspiracy was found to be
more widespread than any had originally realized.

King Manuel II started his reign greatly loved by the vast majority of
his people. He was young, handsome and most felt immense sympathy for
him due to the circumstances which had brought him to the throne. He
also set a tone that he was to be a more “modern” king than his
predecessors. He did away with most of the traditional pomp and ceremony
of the royal court and, not surprisingly considering the fate which
befell his father, declared that he would “reign” but not “rule” and
would not be intervening in political matters as King Carlos had done.
He also quickly set about trying to build a personal relationship with
his subjects, traveling around the country to see and be seen by as many
people as possible. He was highly praised for his frank conversations,
sincerity and informal style. Unfortunately, none of this had any impact
on the blind hatred of the ideologically driven republicans. As the
investigation into the assassinations went forward, it was found that
the web of these villains was extensive indeed and their hostility would
be unremitting. King Manuel II did not remain unaware of this and
decided on a way to try to deal with it but it would mean playing with
fire.

The plan of the young monarch was to try to tame the socialist party,
which, odd as it seems now had never fared well in Portugal, in order to
make them a more palatable alternative to the republican party. Of
course, being socialists, they were naturally republicans as well but
the hope was that they could be made to work within the existing system
of constitutional monarchy and that leftist agitators would abandon the
cause of the republicans who had no other goal than the ruination of the
kingdom. This would be no small trick as it would require two political
miracles; making the republicans go over to the socialists and yet not
have the socialists simply replace them as the primary threat to the
monarchy. King Manuel II hoped that he could weaken the republicans and,
perhaps naively, that the socialists could be a force for good in the
country. Unfortunately, though perhaps not surprisingly, this never
really worked but nor was it given much of a chance to. The situation
was deteriorating faster than anyone would have expected. The efforts to
modernize and any moderation on the part of the Crown was the scent of
blood in the water for the republicans.

In electoral terms, the supporters of the constitutional monarchy did
quite well and the republicans won the least number of seats but,
hypocrites as they inevitably are, they never intended to take power
democratically anyway and from the start were plotting to seize power by
force. The King traveled abroad and reaffirmed the historic alliance
with Great Britain but disaster struck when King Edward VII died and
without him and with a Liberal government in London the Portuguese Royal
Family could expect no help from that quarter in their hour of need. It
also did not help that the British alliance and the friendship between
the British and Portuguese royal houses was still fairly unpopular with a
segment of the population in Portugal over the British seizure of the
African territory between Portuguese East and West Africa. From the time
King Manuel II came to the throne the Kingdom of Portugal would survive
for only 33 months. Of that time, Portugal saw the rise and fall of
seven different governments in 24 of those months. As was all too often
the case, a splintering of the pro-monarchy parties created a power
vacuum that the republicans were only too eager to fill.

The King and royal officials knew something was up and on October 3,
1910 put the soldiers of the Lisbon garrison on the alert and took care
to stay at a different location than his uncle and heir-to-the throne,
Prince Royal Afonso, in case the worse should happen. Rumors of a coup
attempt were thick but republican conspirators nonetheless succeeded,
with some of their fellow members serving in the army, in sparking a
mutiny first in the Sixteenth Infantry and later First Artillery
Regiments. Men from other units joined as well along with a few hundred
civilians and, after clashing with police and some municipal guard
troops along the way, set themselves up behind barricades in Rotunda
Square. By the next morning some naval crews had mutinied as well, one
group of rebels even seizing the cruiser Dom Carlos I, the situation in
the capital was momentarily deadlocked. The rebels had achieved all of
their aims and yet there was no mass uprising of the people as they had
expected. They controlled a major city square and Alcantara parish, but
little more and they could not remain there indefinitely. With no
movement on the part of the public, many rebel leaders gave up and went
home. Unfortunately, the firebrand Machado Santos stayed and determined
to carry on.

The following days, troops from the palace were sent to dislodge the
rebels at Rotunda Square but they were attacked as they came up, fought
off their attackers and pressed on only to be repulsed at the rebel
barricades. They tried to call for reinforcements but telegraph lines
had been cut and railroads smashed to hinder if not prevent just such an
occurrence. The monarchist units began to crack under the stress, a
rebel cruiser shelled government buildings within sight of a Brazilian
battleship which was actually carrying the President of Brazil, a former
Portuguese colony which had only recently overthrown its own monarch of
the same family as King Manuel II (in fact, Emperor Pedro II of Brazil
had been present when the last King of Portugal was born). The King was
doing his best to appear confident and relaxed by the morning of October
5 but found his phone lines cut when rebels attacked the Palace of
Necessidades where he was staying. When the president of the Council of
Ministers finally got in touch with him, he advised him to flee, having
heard that the palace was to be bombarded but King Manuel II refused,
saying he preferred to die at his post.

The palace did come under fire from ships in the harbor but the King
kept his cool and contacted the minister president about what forces
needed to be sent to reinforce the position. As the attack on Rotunda
had already failed, he was advised again that it would be easier to get
him out than to get sufficient loyal troops in. The King agreed to
evacuate to a military school at Mafra, dispatching many of the soldiers
sent to escort him to fight the rebels. However, when he arrived, he
found only a small fraction of the soldiers expected and by that time
had not many with him either. It was decided to bring the Queen Mother
and Dowager Queen Maria Pia of Savoy to Mafra and then they would all go
to Porto to make a proper defense and organize a monarchist
counter-offensive to take back control of Lisbon. Fighting was still
going on there but it came to end in an odd way, all due to a
misunderstanding.

A German diplomat had gone out under a white flag to try to arrange a
cease-fire to evacuate foreign diplomats. The royalist general on hand
agreed, thinking this would also buy him some time for more
reinforcements to come in. However, the sight of the white flag and the
royal forces holding their fire, caused many to believe that the King’s
troops had surrendered and many of the republicans began celebrating.
Now the public made itself known as huge crowds took to the streets.
This buoyed the republicans and totally demoralized the loyalist forces
which soon collapsed, however, many people had no idea what had actually
happened. Some were simply celebrating that the shooting had stopped,
others assumed that it was the rebels who must have surrendered.
However, the rebels wasted no time and proclaimed the First Portuguese
Republic. King Manuel II, still at Mafra, was shocked to receive word
from the civic officials that his country was now a republic and he was
cut off. The arrival of the royal yacht, which had already picked up his
uncle, offered the only chance of escape. The King first hoped to take
the ship to Porto and carry on the struggle as planned but was advised
this would be too risky and, indeed, as it turned out the city would
have been in republican hands by the time they arrived. Instead, they
had just enough fuel to make it to Gibraltar.

King Manuel II was extremely civil about the whole ordeal. After landing
at Gibraltar he even ordered the yacht to return to Portugal on the
grounds that it was government property and not his own. He would live
out the rest of his life in exile in Great Britain. For a kingdom that
dated back to 1139, with roots stretching back even further, it seemed
an anticlimactic end, more like the result of a bizarre accident than a
successful conspiracy. King Manuel II still regarded himself as King of
Portugal, as did the other crowned heads of Europe and, indeed, there
was plenty of reason to hope for a restoration as the First Portuguese
Republic proved to be an incoherent, anticlerical, monument to political
incompetence from start to finish. In 1911 and 1912 there were efforts
at a royal restoration, showing considerable public support for the
monarchy but each were unsuccessful. In 1913 the King married Princess
Augusta Victoria von Hohenzollern but the two never had any children.

In World War I, starting the following year, the King, living in exile
in Middlesex, England, supported the British war effort and approved of
Portuguese involvement in the conflict on the Allied side. This put him
at odds with many of his supporters who hoped for a German-Austrian
victory. However, while intervention was a fiasco, the King’s judgment
ultimately proved correct. Portugal would have lost their African empire
in the event of a German victory and, as it happened, their colonies
were saved by being on the winning team while at the same time the war
severely discredited the republican government. They had been unable to
maintain the Portuguese Expeditionary Force sent to France and
ultimately allowed it to be absorbed into the British military because
they could not provide support for their own soldiers. It was in light
of this that another, very serious, attempt at a restoration of the
monarchy occurred in 1919. Alas, once again, the republic managed to
just survive.

There were also, unfortunately but not surprisingly, problems which the
monarchists created for themselves. Ever since the Liberal Wars of
1828-1834 between the constitutional and absolute monarchists (basically
the Portuguese version of the Spanish Carlist Wars) there had been a
faction of the Portuguese Royal Family providing a rival claim to the
throne in opposition to the victorious constitutional monarchists. At
the time of the overthrow of King Manuel II, the absolutist claimant was
Miguel, Duke of Braganza and this division doubtless hurt the overall
cause of monarchy. It was also all the more pressing given that Manuel
II had no heir to continue the constitutionalist line after the death of
his uncle in 1920 with no heirs either.

King Manuel II and the Duke of Braganza met shortly after the revolution
in Portugal and supposedly the King agreed that the Duke’s line were
part of the family but no more than that and even that remains disputed
to this day by some. Later, in 1922, another agreement was supposedly
reached in France between the two rival claimants that the Duke’s heir,
Duarte Nuno, would succeed Manuel II as claimant to the Portuguese
Crown. However, the absolutists refused to accept allegiance to a
constitutional monarchy and, as the offer by Manuel II depended on this,
it was withdrawn. Maybe. Again, the facts on this are seemingly
impossible to obtain as each side has a different version of events.
Portuguese succession law also proved very problematic and hard to
maneuver around, especially since it could no longer be modified and
there were still those absolutists who would never accept a
constitutional monarchy and constitutional monarchists who would never
accept an absolute one.

As it was, Manuel II, the last King of Portugal to date, died of
suffocation from a throat problem on July 2, 1932 which made the
Miguelist heir Duarte Nuno the ‘last man standing’ and basically the
only option for carrying the monarchist cause forward. By this time the
First Portuguese Republic had fallen apart and a corporatist “New State”
was in place led by Prime Minister Antonio Oliveira de Salazar who had
begun to stabilize things and slowly bring the country back toward
prosperity. A devout Catholic and inclined to monarchist sympathies, he
allowed the remains of King Manuel II to come to Portugal for burial
with full state honors. The sad occasion gathered huge crowds, showing
again how much popular support the monarchy still had in Portugal.
Salazar talked of restoring the monarchy and seriously considered it in
1951 but, perhaps because of the legal disputes and lingering rivalries
within the monarchist community, ultimately never did so. When his
regime was brought down by a military coup in 1974 the revived
Portuguese republic has had basically only liberal or leftist
governments ever since which, of course, have little time for any talk
of monarchy.

In the end, King Manuel II had been a monarch with much promise. He was
very intelligent, very devoted to his country and hoped to bring about a
revival of Portugal by reviving the national pride of the Portuguese
themselves as a unique people with a glorious history. A king at
eighteen he was, nonetheless, inexperienced and was handed a problem on
his first day that had been festering for years and proved worse than
anyone then knew. He had so little time to prove himself that he can
hardly be faulted for how things turned out. The situation which brought
about his downfall was so bizarre as to almost defy belief. For the
rest of his life he seemed the ideal exiled monarch and always seemed
tantalizingly close to restoration only to never have it quite work out.
He may not have always made the right moves, but his heart was always
in the right place and Portugal only suffered by his absence. He could
have done so much more for his country if only he had been allowed the
opportunity.

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"I am worried by the Blessed Virgin's messages to Lucy of Fatima. This persistence of Mary about the dangers which menace the Church is a divine warning against the suicide of altering the Faith, in Her liturgy, Her theology and Her soul. … I hear all around me innovators who wish to dismantle the Sacred Chapel, destroy the universal flame of the Church, reject Her ornaments and make Her feel remorse for Her historical past."A day will come when the civilized world will deny its God, when the Church will doubt as Peter doubted. She will be tempted to believe that man has become God. In our churches, Christians will search in vain for the red lamp where God awaits them. Like Mary Magdalene, weeping before the empty tomb, they will ask, 'Where have they taken Him?'"

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St. Bernard:

Go forth confidently then, you knights, and repel the foes of the cross of Christ with a stalwart heart. Know that neither death nor life can separate you from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ, and in every peril repeat, "Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's." What a glory to return in victory from such a battle! How blessed to die there as a martyr! Rejoice, brave athlete, if you live and conquer in the Lord; but glory and exult even more if you die and join your Lord. Life indeed is a fruitful thing and victory is glorious, but a holy death is more important than either. If they are blessed who die in the Lord, how much more are they who die for the Lord!

How secure, I say, is life when death is anticipated without fear; or rather when it is desired with feeling and embraced with reverence! How holy and secure this knighthood and how entirely free of the double risk run by those men who fight not for Christ! Whenever you go forth, O worldly warrior, you must fear lest the bodily death of your foe should mean your own spiritual death, or lest perhaps your body and soul together should be slain by him.

Indeed, danger or victory for a Christian depends on the dispositions of his heart and not on the fortunes of war. If he fights for a good reason, the issue of his fight can never be evil; and likewise the results can never be considered good if the reason were evil and the intentions perverse. If you happen to be killed while you are seeking only to kill another, you die a murderer. If you succeed, and by your will to overcome and to conquer you perchance kill a man, you live a murderer. Now it will not do to be a murderer, living or dead, victorious or vanquished. What an unhappy victory--to have conquered a man while yielding to vice, and to indulge in an empty glory at his fall when wrath and pride have gotten the better of you!

But what of those who kill neither in the heat of revenge nor in the swelling of pride, but simply in order to save themselves? Even this sort of victory I would not call good, since bodily death is really a lesser evil than spiritual death. The soul need not die when the body does. No, it is the soul which sins that shall die.

The knight of Christ, I say, may strike with confidence and die yet more confidently, for he serves Christ when he strikes, and serves himself when he falls. Neither does he bear the sword in vain, for he is God's minister, for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of the good. If he kills an evildoer, he is not a mankiller, but, if I may so put it, a killer of evil. He is evidently the avenger of Christ towards evildoers and he is rightly considered a defender of Christians. Should he be killed himself, we know that he has not perished, but has come safely into port.

Once he finds himself in the thick of battle, this knight sets aside his previous gentleness, as if to say, "Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord; am I not disgusted with your enemies?" These men at once fall violently upon the foe, regarding them as so many sheep. No matter how outnumbered they are, they never regard these as fierce barbarians or as awe-inspiring hordes. Nor do they presume on their own strength, but trust in the Lord of armies to grant them the victory.

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Saint Athanasius

"May God console you! ... What saddens you ... is the fact that others have occupied the churches by violence, while during this time you are on the outside. It is a fact that they have the premises – but you have the Apostolic Faith. They can occupy our churches, but they are outside the true Faith. You remain outside the places of worship, but the Faith dwells within you. Let us consider: what is more important, the place or the Faith?The true Faith, obviously. Who has lost and who has won in the struggle – the one who keeps the premises or the one who keeps the Faith? True, the premises are good when the Apostolic Faith is preached there; they are holy if everything takes place there in a holy way ..."You are the ones who are happy; you who remain within the Church by your Faith, who hold firmly to the foundations of the Faith which has come down to you from Apostolic Tradition. And if an execrable jealousy has tried to shake it on a number of occasions, it has not succeeded. They are the ones who have broken away from it in the present crisis. No one, ever, will prevail against your Faith, beloved Brothers. And we believe that God will give us our churches back some day. "Thus, the more violently they try to occupy the places of worship, the more they separate themselves from the Church. They claim that they represent the Church; but in reality, they are the ones who are expelling themselves from it and going astray. Even if Catholics faithful to Tradition are reduced to a handful, they are the ones who are the true Church of Jesus Christ."